Tonight (Friday, Feb. 22), Discovery’s hit reality series “Gold Rush” ends its third season with a live, two-hour finale coming from a set built in a warehouse in Portland, Ore. Series executive producer Christo Doyle took some time out from planning for the big finish to answer some questions about the men populating the gold-mining show — especially Todd Hoffman, leader of the show’s first mining crew — and his relationship with them.

On why there’s a live finale:

Doyle: “I opened my dumb mouth at the beginning of the season. I pitched that we do ‘Gold Rush’ live to kick off the season. But it would have been October in the Klondike, and it’s roughly negative 20 degrees there. It just didn’t make all that much sense. So I said, ‘You know what, we’ll just do it at the end of the season.’ And they held me to it.”

On what viewers can expect to see:

Doyle: “Normally in a season finale, we reveal the gold total for each crew, in the actual show. We are going to not be doing that. We are going to be revealing the gold totals live from Portland. The big one is, who hits the motherlode, and do the Hoffmans get the 1,000 ounces that Todd Hoffman told me he was going to get? >>>MORE(Zap2it.com)